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London 2012’s Olympic opening ceremony – in tweets

Over on VeloVoices, the cycling blog I’m involved in running, we do a regular weekly feature called ‘Tweets of the Week’, which takes a Twitter-eye view on what riders, commentators and fans have been saying about the sport over the previous week. I’ve just sat through Danny Boyle’s 80-minute interpretation of British history and culture in the Olympic opening ceremony. It was immensely entertaining on its own, but my enjoyment of the event was greatly enhanced by the 140-character commentary of a wide variety of people on Twitter.

Here’s a sample of the Twitterati’s view of the event. (The Boyle bit, not the parade of nations …)

Let’s kick off with a typically British view of the opening ceremony before it began. Twitter lends itself well to the typically sarcastic and cynical British view of the world, I find:

To truly represent British culture in an Olympic ceremony they should've just had a jumbotron showing a twitter feed of us all mocking it

The inclusion of Tim Berners-Lee, the British founder of the World Wide Web, drew universal praise, with many tweeters recognising his direct influence on laying the foundations for both this and other social media platforms:

And we're all doing this, because of this man. Yes, Tim Berners-Lee, we salute you!

Overall, although there was the odd negative comment about the ceremony, by the end of it even the most cynical tweeters were admitting that it was quite good, and the overwhelming majority of opinions (on my timeline at least) were unapologetically favourable. Here’s a small selection:

Major props to the fevered imagination of director Danny Boyle, who delivered a ceremony which was in turns both serious and tongue-in-cheek, and mixed no insignificant amount of socialist rhetoric with moments of downright slapstick: